For Better For Worse
by The Last Duchess
Summary: When Puck and Rachel graduated high school they had no idea of the joy and despair that was to come. Ten years later they look back on that life and wonder what has brought them to this point.
1. Who Will Dry My Tears?

**Disclaimer: Unsurprisingly I don't own Glee and I'm not making any money from this.**

**For Better For Worse**

**Chapter 1 – Who Will Dry My Tears?**

**Rachel's Story**

As Rachel stared down at the piece of paper on the table before her she couldn't help but wonder what it was that had brought them to this. At what point did this moment become inevitable? Noah would say that it was when she flipped and demanded it. She had done everything she could to get it after all and there was only so much that he could ignore before he had to give in and admit she had him beaten. She was sure however that her demand had not been the reason that this day had become inevitable.

She paused for a moment and started to think hard about what had happened over the course of their time together for this to happen. Perhaps she had to go right back to the beginning. Unknown to most people they had known each other most of their lives. Shabbat services and Sunday school at Temple meant that the handful of Jewish kids in Lima all knew each other from a young age. They were kind of friends but not really. She went to his Bar Mitzvah only because everyone from Temple was invited and the same happened with her Bat Mitzvah a few months later. They really didn't know each other well enough back then for it to have any bearing on what was happening now.

Maybe it really started when he tossed that first Slushie in her face. That first time she kind of got the impression that it was an accident and he had just stumbled because for a moment he looked like he was going to apologise but when everyone started laughing he pulled himself back. So if it wasn't the first Slushie maybe it was the last. The few times where they dated or almost kissed in high school definitely changed things between them. Sure they still weren't best friends but they definitely tolerated each other better than before. Certainly she started seeing him as something other than just a Neanderthal jock and she was fairly sure his opinion of her changed too. Whatever it was it still wasn't significant enough for it to have anything to do with all that came after it.

Perhaps the day that she truly realised that he wasn't a complete jerk had some significance. She never gave any thought to the idea of seeing him again after Graduation; after all they were acquaintances at best. As planned she went to New York where she was enrolled at Columbia. Originally her intention had been to go to Julliard or NYU but when she got the Columbia acceptance she couldn't really turn down an Ivy League school so her dad's agreed that she could hire private teachers to keep her performance skills up while she studied for something a little more conventional. That is how she met Miles Hartley who became more than a piano teacher to her, he discovered her.

She had always been a precocious performer but he was the first one to see past that and realise that her real gift was for composing. She planned to major in Italian with a minor in French but Miles was insistent that music was the only major she should consider. For the first time in her life though she doubted her ability and resolutely stuck to her intention to continue with languages. In order to prove to her that she could be a great composer, Miles persuaded her to volunteer as his assistant at a summer camp in Connecticut where he ran courses on music and song writing. It was here that she saw Puck again. Despite being in the worst high school football team in the state, he had somehow managed to get an athletic scholarship to OSU and he was volunteering with some other members of his team, coaching the kids. As he talked about some of the kids he was working with she realised that he was a good guy after all, he just needed something more than a small town that didn't appreciate him to realise it. That was the day she realised he wasn't a jerk. They made plans to have coffee again on his day off and after that it seemed to naturally progress into a friendship.

So much happened in that first year of college that changed the course of her carefully planned future. If she hadn't met Miles she would never have found out that she was good at song writing; she would never have gone to Connecticut and she never would have had the opportunity to see the real Puck. In many ways it was the most momentous year of her life, but it still wasn't definitive enough to have brought her to this point ten years later.

That summer was enough to convince her that her future was in writing music and not performing it and she decided once and for all to major in music, pleased that she had taken Miles' advice. She was even more pleased when she received a letter from Puck thanking her for the coffees and the nights out. The first thing that got her was that it wasn't an email or a text but a full, handwritten letter. She couldn't remember the last time she had actually taken the time to sit and write a letter. The next thing was that it was a really good letter. His spelling and grammar were appalling but her assumption that he was a man of action and not words lay smashed on the ground by his surprisingly elegant and witty writing style. She found herself writing back just to see if he would write to her again. After that they started a regular correspondence and the letters became longer and more frequent and she became more and more interested in the once standoffish teenager. She even started tuning in to watch his games on the TV. She didn't have the first idea about football but the excited ramblings from the guys doing the talking suggested that he was pretty good. Her roommate Kirsten almost swooned at the idea of her friend receiving old fashioned love letters from a handsome, athletic man. Rachel tried to convince her that it wasn't like that but she couldn't be persuaded.

After seven months of correspondence things changed when, out of the blue, he confessed that he wanted a relationship with her. Even though he hadn't seen her since the summer he felt he had learned about whom she really was through their letters and, if she was up for it, he would really like to give it a try and see where it went. She didn't respond straight away. She was too stunned by what he had said. Was this letter really from Puck? She took out all of his letters and read them again right up to that most recent one which she read so much it became a little dog-eared. She hadn't realised before how much of himself he had given to her in the letters. He didn't just give her accounts of what he did from day to day but he told her about how he felt and she realised that she probably knew Noah Puckerman better than anybody else. Once she realised that he was no longer the angry, hostile teenager from high school she found that she in fact did have feelings for the man she had come to know. She wrote back to him telling him that she agreed that they owed it to themselves to at least try and see if they could make it work. When she put the letter in the mailbox she felt giddy, like she was opening a new chapter in her life. She couldn't know it at the time but she knew now that posting that letter really did open a new door for her. Had it led her to this point, papers on her desk and pen in hand? Maybe, but surely this hadn't been inescapable at that point in time. There must have been something else.

There was only a month between _those _letters and summer. He was volunteering in Connecticut so she decided to go back too. As excited as she was she could never have imagined that it would be so amazing. That was the summer they fell in love. She got into town a few days before him so she was waiting when his truck pulled into the parking lot. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting but she was a little surprised when he casually kissed her lips, draped his arm around her shoulders and said 'thanks for meeting me babe' as if they had been dating for years. In that moment she realised that _Noah_ didn't only exist in his letters. He was flesh and blood and when she looked at him she no longer saw Puck.

At first they took things slowly. They went on dates and they had long make-out sessions but they were counsellors at a kid' summer camp. The opportunities to get it on weren't exactly abundant. That isn't to say that it remained innocent for the entire summer. There was only so much kissing Rachel could take before she persuaded her fellow counsellors to help her out and get them some privacy so that he could finally show her how much of a stud he really was. All that talk in high school wasn't an exaggeration. As his summer training drew near they didn't talk about what was going to happen next, they didn't have to. They didn't need to make plans to know that this was going to work.

The ensuing 2 years of college were happy but frustrating. They kept up their correspondence and his letters became more, for want of a better word, puckish. He would wildly veer from the everyday mundane to the wildly romantic to the downright naughty. They supplemented the letters with phone conversations where she would play her latest compositions for him and he would read to her from the stories he wrote for the Lantern. She had never really thought about him as anything other than a football player so he had shocked her when he told her he was majoring in journalism and was thinking about doing a couple of internships to see if it was for him. He knew that he had a good shot at the NFL but he didn't want it. He had new goals and all of them included Rachel.

She was so happy to be part of his life and her only frustration came from not being with him. She saw him when he had some big event like Michigan week or when he came to New York to get some award. In turn he came to her concerts but the trips were expensive and not as frequent as either of them would have liked. She had little things that made her feel closer to him like wearing his jersey - much to the dismay of her friends who didn't understand what she saw in a jock - and feeling proud when she overheard guys talking about how big a star he was going to be.

By the time graduation came round she was practically bursting with excitement at the thought of them finally being together all of the time. She was so proud when she sat next to his Mom and sister and watched him get his degree that she actually thought she was going to explode. He had finally convinced a dozen NFL teams that he wasn't interested in going pro and once both of them were graduated they packed up their dorms, putting their stuff in storage for the summer, and headed off for their next big adventure. Three months in Europe, a graduation gift courtesy of their parents. That was a perfect time for them; it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the tears that were now pooling in her eyes.

The first couple of years of them living together were great. Sure they had no money but they were finally in the same place. They had a tiny apartment in the East Village which was just big enough for her, Noah and an electric piano. Rachel spent most of her days in the music room/living room/bedroom writing jingles for commercials. It was a crappy job but it meant that they could eat and at least she was getting heard. Noah was doing a Masters at NYU while working nights behind a bar in SoHo. He was so confident that he could make it and that dedication paid off when he landed an internship at the New York Times followed by a job offer. It was low paid but it was worth another year of having no cash when he got his chance on the sports pages. Suddenly he was writing regular articles and he was quickly promoted. At the same time Rachel was starting to get her name known and better commissions were coming her way. A couple of TV shows and a small indie movie later and they were buying their first apartment together. Her life wasn't what she had planned when she was in high school but she didn't care because it was better than she ever could have imagined and it was about to get better.

She could never forget the day she woke up and on a crazy whim decide that they should head up to Connecticut for a few hours because that was the day that he went down on one knee, gave her his grandmother's diamond and asked her to marry him. Six months later her Fathers were giving her away in the New York Public Library and they became Mr & Mrs Puckerman. He had been so nervous but so handsome and the look of intense devotion in his eyes as he gazed at her and slid the ring on her finger still gave her shivers. How could that feeling have resulted in this? It just wasn't possible.

Just like the years before, their first year of marriage was too glorious to have contributed to what came next. She moved on from writing minor scores to collaborating on a musical which took up a lot of her time but she had a wonderful husband who was behind her every step of the way. Every time he showed up at the theatre with flowers just because he could, or when he was on the front row on opening night applauding the loudest and beaming with pride, she would fall a little bit more in love with him.

As she considered what happened next she thought she was perhaps getting closer to the truth she was grasping for. Was it the moment that she rolled closer to him as they lay in bed, wrapped her arms around his chest and whispered in his ear 'let's make a baby' that set them on this course? When she saw the look of pleasure on his face as she asked him to be the father of her children he had never looked more handsome. In the following months they began to make plans. They were both tested to make sure they weren't carriers for any genetic diseases and they started looking for a house. They talked about names, nursery decorations, music lessons, little league and anything else they could think of to give their baby the normal childhood neither of them had really had. As soon as they moved into their new house in Brooklyn she stopped her birth control pills, started taking folic acid and within 3 months she was pregnant. The speed of it all was surely a sign that it was meant to happen. There was no way that the decision to have a child had made this day a certainty.

Her pregnancy was everything she could have hoped for. Noah took a job on the city news desk so that there was no chance he would be sent off on assignment to cover a game. He never missed a doctor's appointment. He would go out in the middle of the night in search of the weirdest things because she had a craving. He held her gently and dried her tears when she decided that she was fat and ugly. When her crazy hormones kicked in and she wanted him all the time he was more than happy to oblige her. She laughed when she thought of the times that he had pressed his open hand to her stomach as if to high five the baby for making Mommy lust after Daddy so much. She always pretended to be outraged for a moment before she would pull him to her and demonstrate just what the baby he had put in her belly was doing to her appetites.

The sonogram where they had found out that they were having a boy was the first time she had ever seen him have to brush away a tear. He had been through some rough times over the years but she had never seen him cry. The fact that their son meant so much to him he momentarily forgot his badassness, moved her more than she could express.

The birth of their son was not quite as peaceful as she had hoped. Her plans for a natural childbirth were forgotten when, after 6 hours of labour, she was demanding drugs and threatening to cut Noah's balls off if he ever tried to get into her bed again. He was clearly blocking her out because he just held her hand, kissed her brow and whispered to her about how wonderful she was. After another 8 hours of screaming, swearing and plotting revenge, Daniel Caleb Puckerman made his grand entrance into the world. He was exactly 7 pounds of angry, bawling perfection. It took just one shriek from her son to move her from wanting to castrate her husband to wondering how she would ever be able to repay him for giving her this moment. As she looked from the tiny baby in her arms to Noah's eyes, which were unashamedly shedding tears of joy, she had never felt so complete. It was the most wonderful moment of her life and she would not taint it by suggesting it had anything to do with what she was going through now.

They had four months of blissfully happy family life before Rachel realised something was wrong. Daniel started to get little red spots over his belly and back and occasionally it seemed like he was out of breath but when he had his well baby check up he seemed alright and the nurse told her not to worry he was fine. Another month went by and she noticed bruises on his legs that she couldn't explain. Next he got a fever that didn't seem to be going away. After a couple of days Noah and Rachel put their baby in his car seat and took him to the hospital. Tests were carried out and the doctors sat them down and uttered the words that all parents feared more than anything 'Daniel has Leukaemia'. They stayed at the hospital with him that night and just watched him sleep while they held each other and prayed to whatever God would listen to them for a miracle.

The days following the diagnosis were hard. Initially they had hope because they had requested that Daniel's cord blood be frozen but this hadn't happened due to an 'administrative error'. When they were told this Rachel had never seen Noah so angry. Not even Puck had ever gone off like this before. Once they had gotten over this news they found out that the cancer was more advanced than they thought and his chances weren't as good as hoped. This only fuelled the rage they both felt. Rage at the nurse for telling them that everything was fine; rage at the hospital for screwing up; rage at God for doing this to their baby; rage at themselves for not being able to help him.

It was the self hatred that haunted Rachel the most. The fact that she was powerless to help her child as she watched him slip away destroyed her. All of their friends and family were tested for bone marrow donation but there were no matches and they were left to the mercy of the transplant list. She even contacted Shelby for the first time since she had sent her photos of her wedding to see if either her or Beth were a match, they weren't. All the waiting with nothing happening wound them up tighter and tighter until the day Noah was arrested for assault after beating up some mouthy jerk at a Knicks game he was covering as a favour. After that it was decided he should take a leave of absence until Daniel was better. The reappearances of Puck scared Rachel out of her mind. She was already losing her son she couldn't lose her husband too.

In September, after months of chemo, Daniel finally decided enough was enough. The doctors told them that he wasn't responding to treatment and that he probably wouldn't survive the night so Rachel took him in her arms and he nestled into her, just as he had when he was a newborn, while he held his father's finger in his tiny hand. Just before midnight he looked up at his parents for a few moments, as if he was saying goodbye, closed his eyes and he was gone. They held him for a little while longer before the nurse took him then they collapsed into one another's arms, sobbing the terrible sobs of parents forced to accept the death of their child and Rachel thought she was going to die from the pain.

The funeral was the worst day of her life. Her dads made the arrangements as neither Rachel nor Noah were in a fit state to do anything. Aside from the tears that would not stop, Rachel felt empty. She couldn't even reach out to Noah for fear of provoking one of the terrible rages he had been flying into. They had both known that it was coming but the shock of losing their child left a hole in their lives that couldn't ever be filled. She had been surprised when he held her all through the service, never once letting go to wipe at the tears that were streaming down his face. Despite the terrible anger he had been displaying he was there for her that day. He was the only one able to give her any comfort and he had sacrificed his masculine pride to do it. Despite the circumstances she had never seen him show her such devotion before and she returned it in equal measure.

The following months were spent in a state of numbness. Noah went back to work and Rachel would spend her days at home trying not to cry. Occasionally she would go into the music room and play around with some melodies but she never bothered to write anything down and she would always have forgotten them by the time Noah got home. She just couldn't shake the thought that she had let this happen. She knew that something was wrong, she should have insisted on the tests earlier instead of letting the damn nurse talk her into thinking he was fine. What sort of mother would take the word of a stranger over her own instinct when it came to her child?

As this guilt took over she didn't know what to do with herself. She would wander around in a daze until suddenly something would happen and she would remember that Daniel wasn't there anymore. The first time she went out after the funeral, she heard a baby cry and started to lactate. She received letters from pre-schools they had put their names down for when they first started trying for a baby. She kept finding his clothes in the laundry. Every time she was reminded of what she had lost she hated herself a little bit more.

The day that would have been his first birthday was naturally hard for them. They went to Temple in the morning and prayed with the Rabbi and then Noah drove them up to Connecticut and they walked in the wood where he had proposed to her. They both needed a happy memory to get them through the day. It was here that he suggested she should maybe think about going to stay with her dads for a while. Perhaps getting out of New York would do her good. She knew that watching her moping must be getting tedious for him and he probably needed a break from being her only shoulder to cry on. She was a handful at the best of times and these were the worst of times. They went home that evening and Noah ordered dinner for them and booked a flight to Columbus while she packed a suitcase. They made love for the first time in months that night. He mapped her entire body with his big hands and soft lips. The thought of the care and attention he had shown her that night still gave her shivers.

As always, Noah had been right. The time away was good from her. Her dads enjoyed taking care of her and they cheered her up without trying to make her forget. They hadn't known their grandson as well as they would have liked so they were keen to hear anything Rachel was willing to tell them. She met up with old friends who were able to take her mind off things, if only for an hour or too. She also took the opportunity to head over to Dayton a few times to see Shelby and Beth. It was sometimes hard to see how much the little girl looked like Noah without wondering if Daniel would have been the image of his father too. At the same time though she began to really think of the little girl as a sister and her laughter genuinely brought joy to her heart.

She spoke to Noah every night. Her Daddy had an overseas client who he called every evening at 6.30 and then as soon as that was done Noah would call. She had asked him why he waited for the line to be free and didn't call her cell phone but he just made some caveman comment about not being able to have good phone sex with the threat of the battery running out hanging over them. He always knew just what she needed. If she was down he would have something to lift her spirits; when she was angry he would soothe her; when she was lonely he would engage in the sort of naughty talk that she had come to expect from him but still got her hot under the collar.

Once her muddled mind began to emerge from the fog a little Rachel started thinking about the future. Obviously another child was out of the question. She clearly wasn't fit to be a mother. Once she realised this the next step was to consider the position of her marriage. She loved her husband. She couldn't think of any way she could love him more and without him she probably would not have survived but could she really be so selfish as to condemn him to a life without children? The more time she spent with Beth the more she realised that any child of Noah's is guaranteed to be special. Then there were the tears in his eyes when Daniel was born that said everything. He was born to be a father and the more those images of Noah and Daniel together invaded her mind it became more obvious what she had to do. She had to go back to New York and ask for a divorce.

To the outside observer it would seem clear this it was this moment that had led her to being here today but Rachel wasn't so sure. Noah's stubbornness and loyalty made sure that she was not going to get what she wanted easily.

She had intended to sit down and talk about it the day she returned to New York but after he greeted her at the airport her with flowers and whisked her off to the Four Seasons for a romantic/dirty night together, she just didn't have the heart to bring it up. Over the next few months she would spend whole days building up the courage to talk to him only to lose it when he would come home with gifts or announce he was taking her out. It soon became clear that she was too much of a coward - another reason why she was no longer right for him – to do it the honest way. This failure made her realise that the only way she could do this would be to push him so that he no longer wanted her.

She started by closing herself off from him. She would spend all of her time in the music room or at the studio where she was producing an album for her college roommate. She would even sleep there some nights. When she did sleep in their bed she would always come up with a reason why they shouldn't have sex. When her musical was picked up for a Broadway run she negotiated a part for herself so that she had rehearsals to add to her reasons for not being at home. Next she persuaded him to go back to the sports desk so that he would have to start travelling again. The separations didn't seem to bother him too much though and he even suggested that maybe the time was right to try for another baby. He looked so hopeful that she didn't have the heart to tell him what she had decided so she told him that she would stop taking her birth control pills while at the same time secretly refilling her prescription. It was clear that more drastic action was needed.

She started to 'forget' important days like their anniversary and his birthday. She spent Yom Kippur on a day long bender with a record producer who wanted to her to write songs for the label even though she knew he was cooking dinner for them after sundown. They went to a benefit hosted by the Times editor and she slept through the speeches, flirted outrageously with a teenage waiter and left while the awards were being given out so that she could meet with some of the session musicians from the studio. When she stumbled into the house at 3am completely hammered she had expected him to lay into her. Instead he handed her a bottle of water, kissed her forehead and told her not to stay up too late. The following morning there was another bottle of water and 2 Advil on the nightstand with a note telling her to get some rest. When nothing seemed to making him mad she set him up on a date with a beautiful young book editor she had met at a party. He thought they were meeting to discuss the possibility of publishing the book he had written but Rachel made sure that they met alone and in a romantic setting. However, even with opportunity and encouragement, nothing happened. He came home one day, told her that the publishers weren't interested in the book and he would try again at a better time. At this point Rachel knew she had only one card left to play.

It wasn't hard to get the male star of her show naked on their couch at the exact time she expected Noah home. What was hard was listening to him forgive her yet again. It had been the last straw; she couldn't play these games anymore. When he asked if she had used a condom because she wasn't on the pill anymore she flipped. She told him all about her secret birth control and the fact that she never had any intention of getting pregnant again and then she demanded a divorce. The strangest thing was that he agreed. It seemed he could handle her craziness and determination to hurt him; it was the lies that were the step too far. He moved out of the house that night and he had been living in an apartment on the Upper East Side ever since.

She had thought that being out of his life would be a relief. That she would no longer feel guilty about dragging him down with all of her crazy. The truth was though she didn't. All she could think of was the pain she had already put him through. It was only made worse when Quinn of all people turned up on her doorstep and almost forcibly removed her from the house to take her to her cottage on Martha's Vineyard. She had gone through a divorce herself the year before and had a rough idea of what Rachel was going through but she pulled no punches when she told her that Noah was worried sick about her. After a week of talking and soul searching she agreed to go to a therapist, if only to ease Noah's concern. When Shelby called and announced that she and Beth were going to move to New York at the end of the school year she saw Noah's hand in it straight away and she knew that the only way to make him let her go and live his life was to ensure that this divorce happened, the sooner the better.

Back in the present Rachel looked over her shoulder through the open door to the bedroom where she could clearly see the naked form of Noah Puckerman asleep in the rumpled sheets of her bed. He had come over the night before to give her the divorce papers to sign. One thing had led to another and here she was wearing his shirt, about to end her marriage with a flick of her pen and wondering how the hell she had got here. It bothered her that she couldn't come up with some definite answer. There was nothing about their life together that had made this moment unavoidable. Only her own inadequacies as a wife and mother.

She took one last look at her husband, picked up her pen and with a few strokes of ink she was no longer Mrs Puckerman. Suddenly how this had happened no longer mattered, the past was no longer important. All she could think of was, without Noah, who was going to dry the tears that fell onto the desk now?


	2. Just Another Lima Loser

**For Better For Worse**

**Chapter 2 – Just Another Lima Loser**

**Puck's Story**

When Puck woke up that morning he felt good. For the first time in months he had slept well without waking up wondering where he was or why he was alone. He had woken up just once in the night but the presence of his wife in the bed beside him had soothed him and he was asleep again in no time. He couldn't believe how long he had gone without this. Without her. When he had felt the sun coming in through their bedroom window and warming his face as he woke, he thought that today could be the day things changed, the day when he no longer missed his wife. Now he was staring at the paper she clutched in her hands and he knew that day would never come.

If 10 years ago somebody had said that one day Rachel Berry would break his heart so badly that he would feel like he was dying he would have said they were full of shit before throwing them into a dumpster. Now he just wished that somebody could have warned him. Maybe then he wouldn't be sitting here staring at his _ex_ wife as his whole life seemed to flash before his eyes or, to be more specific, his life with her. He saw all of those times he had wiped those tears from her face both because she was deliriously happy or in so much pain she thought she would die. He had always tried his best to be there for her and it killed him that it hadn't been enough.

Because they were both from the same small town everyone assumed that they had been childhood sweethearts. Not only did that phrase make him want to gag, it was completely untrue. During childhood, and even adolescence, they were very much on the periphery of one another's existence. They went to Sunday school together and he recalled she had the best Bat Mitzvah party ever but she was never more that a girl he knew of. Even during the Slushie soaked mess of early high school they were just acquaintances. In truth the first time he did it, it was an accident. He stumbled and the ice went flying. He had been mortified thinking that he had shown himself up as a complete klutz and was about to apologise when everyone started laughing and high fiving him and a reputation was born.

They both went off to college without any thought for what the future held for the other because despite their short relationship and being in Glee together, they still weren't friends. She went off to New York which everybody expected, and he went to OSU which nobody expected. After he and Quinn gave Beth to Shelby he had felt so ashamed. Ashamed that he was too much of a loser to look after his daughter; ashamed that he was turning into as much of a douche as his father; ashamed that he had made his mother cry. He knew he had to get out of this town and do something that would make his Mom proud. He started going to class and, while he still thought it was boring as hell, managed to pull his GPA up to something respectable if not stellar and got unexpectedly good SAT scores. He saved his money from his pool cleaning business and enrolled in OSU's summer football camp. After impressing the coaches with his playing skills and the admissions guys with his academics he somehow managed to get an athletic scholarship. He'll never forget how his Mom cried when he told her and he realised that making people proud of you could be addictive.

He learned a lot about himself in his first year of college. Going to his classes taught him that he liked knowing stuff; he actually thought it was pretty cool. He became much more discerning when it came to women, realising that happiness doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with long legs and a nice rack. This discovery that he liked smart women was something of a revelation. It led him to take Communication 101 with the hot pre-law redhead in the room below him which in turn led him to Professor Walker who revealed one of the biggest lessons of his college career to him. He was a natural writer. His spelling and vocabulary sucked but he definitely had talent. The other lesson was that he was a much better football player than he had thought. The move from wide receiver to running back was paying off and he was starting most games. For the first time ever he actually had options and he really seemed to have a future.

Before he could really consider any of this it was summer and he had to haul himself all the way to Connecticut. At some point, probably when he was very drunk, he had agreed to go with a couple of the guys from football to help coach at some camp for inner city kids that they had both been to in high school. He didn't know what he had expected but bumping into Rachel Berry wasn't it. As soon as he had realised who the hot girl counsellor playing the piano was Rachel he couldn't stop himself from looking at her. Inevitably they talked and made arrangements to meet for coffee. Over the course of the next few weeks they met up quite a few times and he had yet another revelation. Rachel Berry was really not bat shit crazy. College had been _very_ good to her and he sort of wanted her to know that college had been good for him too. That he wasn't the jerk everyone thought he was. If he could just get one person from the past to believe that then maybe he really had changed.

When he got back to Columbus for summer training he intended to email her or something to let her know that he enjoyed hanging out with her and they should keep in touch but he never got round to it. Once classes started again he was persuaded/strong armed into taking more communications courses by Professor Walker who really wanted him to consider journalism as a major. His first assignment was to write a letter to someone. Not an email or a text but a proper, old school letter with a pen and a piece of paper. He could only really think of one person who would genuinely appreciate getting a letter rather than an email and that's how he came to engage in correspondence with Rachel Berry

In her letters he realised just how funny she was. He could often be found in the quad outside his dorm eating his lunch and laughing his ass off at her descriptions of her crazy tutors and insane classmates. After a few months he realised that every word she wrote evoked a reaction in him, including jealousy when she told him about the dates she went on. He couldn't work out when but at some point he had started to think of the crazy midget as his. He started making his letters a little more personal, revealing more about himself to her. He wanted her to maybe start feeling the same way about him but she never gave him any indication that she might. It took him another few months and a few too many beers to man up and do something about it. He was incredibly relieved when she wrote back and agreed to meet with him in Connecticut during the summer. He had already lost too many friends through drunken mistakes and he couldn't lose her. Despite the changes in him, he was too much of a badass to pull off heartbroken.

The summer was another important learning experience. He learned that Rachel Berry was everything he could possibly want in a woman. His list was pretty demanding; hot, smart, talented, confident and sexually aggressive. As well as being all of those things Rachel could also add adventurous and flexible into the mix. He was one lucky stud.

That summer they didn't really talk about the future but he was fine with that. He didn't need to talk about it to know that they had one and so he spent his final 2 years of college living 600 miles away from his girlfriend just wishing they could be together more often. Not that they never saw each other. He tried to make it to as many of her showcases and recitals as possible and she, being the perfect girlfriend, was always there when he needed her. During Michigan week she got her roommate to tell her tutors that she was sick so that she could watch him play. When he was having a hard time and feeling really guilty after he wrote an exposé in The Lantern she dropped everything and got on the first plane to Columbus. She was the perfect date to the Heisman dinner where he officially picked up the Heisman Trophy; being beautiful and charming when she had to be but blending perfectly into the background when it was his turn for the spotlight. When he learned three months later that she had passed on an invitation to a song writing master class with some Broadway dude that she loved just to be his date he was livid but at the same time it made him realise that he had to do whatever he could to hold onto her.

When he started getting calls from agents promising him that he would be going number 1 in the Draft he realised he had a decision to make. If he decided to go for it and try to play professional football he was sure that Rachel would follow him. She had already said as much when she told him that she could write songs anywhere. He knew he wouldn't be able to live with himself though if he took her away from the place where she belonged. New York was the place that had turned her into the woman he had fallen in love with. New York was the place he wanted them to be. Besides he wasn't sure that he wanted the NFL. To be a pro athlete was never an ambition of his. The scholarship was a way of going to a college that his family would never have been able to afford and doing something that they could be proud of. Education had given him new goals. He had talked to Professor Walker about his chances at making it as a journalist and she confessed that she had already been talking to her contacts about him and people were impressed. So with her guidance he did a couple of internships and got himself a place on the Masters course at NYU. He was going to New York.

Of course she graduated top of her class and picked up a job straight away freelancing for an ad agency which was beneath her and a total waste of her talent but they had to eat. He felt a little guilty that she was stuck doing something she hated so that he could go to school and he was terrified that he wouldn't be able to make it up to her. He was nowhere near as smart as the others in his class. He thought he'd be lucky to be writing the obituaries in the Lima Gazette when he graduated so he was floored when he beat out thousands to get an internship at the New York Times. When that actually led to a job he thought he was dreaming and he was going to wake up in his old room in Lima and have to get up to go to school.

The first year blew. He was fetching coffee for the editors and running errands for the reporters and he was earning less than he had been behind the bar in SoHo. In fact he had seriously been considering calling one of the sports agents who stuffed their card into his pocket and told them to call him if he changed his mind about the NFL when the sports editor came to him and asked for a sidebar to fill a gap on the big Superbowl preview story. That led to a couple more slightly longer pieces and by the time the Draft came round he was covering it as a permanent member of the Sports Desk team.

After a couple of years in New York they were finally finding their feet. He was bringing home a good wage and was becoming respected as a sports journalist; Rachel was finally doing the things that she loved, writing contemporary pop songs for some pretty big recording artists, orchestral performance pieces and they finally had enough money to get a better place. By the time Passover came around and they went back to Ohio to celebrate with their families he had made a big decision. First he had to get to see his mom without Rachel so that he could ask her for his Grandmother's ring and again he got that rush when he realised he had made his mother happy. Once that was accomplished he got his mom to take Rachel to lunch or shopping or anything so that he could sit down with her Fathers and ask their permission to marry their daughter. Despite the initial reservations they'd had about their precious baby girl getting mixed up with the scary kid with the Mohawk, they didn't even pause to think before standing up, shaking his hand and welcoming him to the family. He wanted to propose in the little wood that they used to walk in during their summers in Connecticut but he didn't want her to suspect that he was going to do it. He put a picture that she had taken of the woods up in the hallway; left the lifestyle section open at the page talking about homes in New Haven; talked about the really great sandwiches they used to in the deli in town. It was anything to make her think that heading up there for a day or two was her idea. That night, after they got back to the city, he slept well for the first time in ages, without the fear of a future without her.

Things seemed to happen fast after that. They were married six months later on one of the best and most terrifying days of his life. There was no question that he wanted to be with her but the spectre of his dad and the douche he had turned out to be haunted him. Did he really have what it took to be a good husband? He got the answer a year later when Rachel turned to him in bed and seductively whispered in his ear 'let's make a baby'. He must have been a good husband to her if she had so much faith in him to be a good father to her children.

When he was at high school he had thought he was a stud. That cocky, mohawk wearing little bastard didn't know studly. No guy truly knew what it was to be a _man_ until he had been in bed with his pregnant wife and laid his hand on her belly to feel his son kick for the first time. He couldn't really count what happened with Quinn. He wasn't a stud when he got her pregnant, he was a dick. She was his best friend's girl. That shit was not cool. He had thought he was badass. Now he knew that badass was not being afraid to shed tears at the birth of your child. Only a complete douche would be so concerned with image that he would hide that emotion.

Before Danny was born he would have confessed that he was a little scared by the prospect of fatherhood. He didn't exactly have a good role model to base himself on. The second his son entered the world though he knew that his doubts were for nothing. He knew that there was nothing he wouldn't do for the kid. Fatherhood was a gift unlike any other and he had no idea how he could ever repay Rachel for giving him that opportunity. He used to go into the nursery when Rachel was asleep just to look at him. He was so perfect. In those moments his mind would sometimes wander to the child he never got to look at like this. Rachel got occasional letters and phone calls from Shelby giving updates about how she was doing but they never saw her. It was just too awkward for all of them. It didn't stop him though, when he sat in the nursery in the dark, from thinking about whether she looked like Quinn or like him and what sort of kid she really was beyond the picture of a little angel that Shelby painted. Then he would realise that Danny was awake and looking at him and he was brought back to the present. Just as long as his little girl was happy and well cared he would concentrate on looking after his little guy just as well.

When Danny was 4 months old Rachel mentioned to him that he was covered in weird spots but when the nurse said it was fine and nothing to worry about he accepted that. Then it was bruising on his legs. Rachel was worried but he thought the kid was probably kicking at the sides of his crib, preparing for the day when he would be as good a football player as his old man. Finally when she was freaking out about his fever he realised that she had a point. Their doctor said they should give him Infant Tylenol and see what happened but Puck wasn't happy about that so they got him in his car seat and drove him to the hospital. He was admitted that night and his parents had an anxious wait. Puck kept telling himself that it was nothing, they were being over cautious, so when the doctor sat them down and told them it was cancer he was completely unprepared.

The following days and weeks saw his rage at the situation fester and grow inside him. The catalogue of errors that had led to his son being sicker than he had to be made him want to hurt someone. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that no matter how hard he was taking it Rachel had to be feeling it worse. She was his mother for God's sake. Puck couldn't begin to fathom the sort of bond they had. There came a point though, not even the prospect of his wife's disappointment in him held him back. He was covering a Knicks game and the big mouthed bastard behind him kept giving the team shit. When he started talking about the Point Guard's pregnant wife Puck just lost it and pummelled the guy. He couldn't stop himself. It was like he wasn't controlling his own body. He was arrested but the guy decided not to press charges after his editor came to bail him out and explained the situation. After that it was decided that he should take a leave of absence. He agreed, not really having the strength to argue.

When it was decided that Danny needed a bone marrow transplant all of their friends and family stepped up. When that led to nothing Puck swallowed his pride and went to find the man he had vowed he would never take anything from. He knew Rachel had even gone to Shelby and she and Beth had been tested but there was no match so he had to try and find his father. He followed a few leads but the trail went dead at a motel near Louisville and for the first time ever Puck genuinely hoped the son of a bitch was dead. It was at that moment that he realised there was really nothing he could do. He just had to sit back and watch while his baby suffered.

Every morning he saw Rachel get up early to go to Shacharit where he knew she was begging God for a miracle. He had done the same thing when he first found out his son was dying but not anymore. God had clearly given up on them and the moment he felt his baby boy's tight grasp on his finger loosen and saw his little chest stop moving was the moment that he gave up on God.

In the days after the smallest thing set him off into a rage. Somebody would call the house trying to sell them something or the mailman would rattle to letterbox too loudly and he would go nuts. His Mom and sister and Rachel's Dads had flown in to arrange the funeral and even they were avoiding him lest they set him off. It wasn't until the morning of the funeral when he yelled at his sister for breaking a glass that his mother decided enough was enough. When she told him that Rachel was frightened of him because of his temper he couldn't take it anymore and he broke down crying in his mother's arms. He clung to Rachel throughout the funeral, partly because he felt so ashamed that he hadn't been there for her when she needed him and partly because he felt if he let go of her he would be letting go of himself.

After a couple of weeks their families went back to Ohio and they were left with their own thoughts. He reined in his temper after his talk with his mother. He didn't want Rachel thinking that he wasn't there for her. She had been through enough already without thinking that she was losing her husband. He was frankly amazed that she wanted to be anywhere near him. If he had only listened to her when she first mentioned she thought Danny wasn't well. What sort of father was he? The least he could do was try to be as good a husband as she was a wife.

He went through the next few months like a robot. He went back to work but his passion for writing was gone and all of his colleagues were tiptoeing around him. More than once somebody he hadn't seen for a while would ask how fatherhood was treating him and somebody would quickly guide them away and explain what had happened. The worst thing was the pity in their eyes as they looked back at him. He was used to people looking at him with fear or anger and even disgust, but never pity. The problem was he didn't even care. He tried to be strong for Rachel but there were days when it was impossible to hide the fact that he missed his little boy terribly. It was on a day like this, when he had shed a few silent tears over breakfast, that he came home to find that Rachel had brought him then one thing that could help. His daughter.

The 9 year old sitting alone on the couch looked so much like him that he knew instantly who she was and they spent hours just talking. She told him about school and how much she loved writing which led them to his talking about his job as a professional writer at which she looked at him like he was some sort of hero. Surprisingly it wasn't awkward when she asked him to tell her about Danny. It felt good to talk to his daughter about her little brother. When Shelby took a sleepy Beth back to their hotel and Rachel emerged from upstairs where she had been talking to her mother, Noah pulled her into his lap and thanked her for being such an amazing wife. He knew how hard this must have been for her. Seeing her husband's healthy daughter; the child her own mother had raised with all of the love and attention she had never given to her. In that moment as he held her to him he made a silent promise that he was going to do whatever it took to get her through this and make her smile again.

Bringing the smile he loved back to her face was easier said than done. Most evenings when he got home he would find her crying because a friend who hadn't heard had asked her about Danny or she had received a brochure from a pre-school. She wasn't writing anything. Like he had lost his passion for words, she had lost her passion for music. He just didn't know how to help and her, and it scared him. She refused to see her doctor, claiming she would just put her on medication and she flipped when he suggested a few sessions with a therapist might help. She screamed at him that she wasn't crazy before locking herself in the music room for the whole night. He regularly spoke to his Mom and her Dads and even once or twice to Shelby and they all suggested that she might want to get out of New York for a while. Spend some time in a place where she wasn't reminded of Danny every place she looked. He wasn't too keen at first. Sure she was acting all kinds of crazy but she was his wife and he loved and needed her. Could he cope with her not being around? It became clear pretty quickly though that he was being selfish. He could handle being away from her for a few months if it meant she could find some peace.

The three months she was away was the longest three months of his life. He hadn't realised before just how much he relied on her being around. It wasn't the sex he was missing. Aside from the night before she left for Ohio, they hadn't made love in months. What he missed was her. The house was just so lonely without her in it. He got into a routine of speaking to her Dad's every night to see how she was doing, knowing that she would lie to him and say she was fine. As soon as he was done speaking to them he was call her, already knowing what sort of day she'd had and knowing what he might be able to say to make her feel just a little better. He found that she was happiest on the days where she had seen somebody she knew from school or the community theatre so he made a few calls. Dinner with Will and Emma became a regular thing. Kurt brought forward his trip home to visit his father and Carol. She even started having brunch every Sunday with Santana! She started spending time with Shelby and Beth at their home in Dayton, getting to know them as her mother and little sister and it was this that seemed to bring the spark back.

When she told him she was ready to return to New York he was a little apprehensive but at the same time he desperately wanted his wife back. On the day she flew back into La Guardia he borrowed his editor's Town Car and driver for a few hours and whisked her off to a suite at the Four Seasons. He just wanted to show her how much he missed her and that he treasured every moment that he was with her.

After she got back things started to go pretty well for them for a while. Puck was starting to enjoy his work again. He started to do some work on the stories he used to tell Danny about Felix the Fantastic, a 10 year old football player with the Cleveland Browns, who was whisked away to another time and place every time he scored a touchdown. Rachel had insisted that he write them down so that she could read them to Danny when he was away. They had been stuck in a drawer in the nursery until recently when Puck discovered that editing them and writing down new ideas inexplicably made him feel closer to his son. Rachel was working on music again. Her college roommate Kirsten, hot off a Tony nominated run in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, had decided she wanted to make another album and of course the only songwriter and producer she would consider was Rachel. There was the occasional rough patch to contend with. The anniversary of Danny's death was hard on both of them but it didn't set Rachel back any, which he had feared. There were a couple of days of tears but she was right back in the music room or in the studio after that.

He genuinely thought that she was over the worst of her grief and was becoming herself again. He forgot that, despite her decision to follow music as a career, she was also, potentially, the best actress of her generation. If he had thought for one minute that she was still so messed up he would have kept the suggestion that they try for another baby to himself. She went along with him, going off the pill and taking the vitamins again, but he could tell that something had changed.

She started locking herself in the music room or sleeping at the studio. She 'forgot' important dates and bailed on him at really bad times so that she could get hammered with music execs and session musicians. When the musical she had written a few years ago was picked up for a Broadway run, she got a role in it herself. If she wasn't rehearsing at the theatre, she was recording with Kirsten or partying with God knows who. When he was offered job back on the Sport's Desk he turned it down, not wanting to get sent away on assignment regularly but Rachel went nuts when she found out, insisting that sports writing was what he loved and there was no reason for him to pass the opportunity up. After that he was sent away on assignment at least twice a month. It got to the point that a week could go by and he wouldn't see her at all.

It wasn't until Kathryn Gold entered the picture that Puck realised that Rachel was really spiralling out of control. Rachel met the Children's book editor at a party and told her about the manuscript for Felix. She was interested in the concept and Rachel set up a meeting. Puck found it a little weird that it was in a candle lit restaurant. It was more the sort of place you would take a date. Because of this he kept it strictly professional, talking only about the book and none of the experiences that had inspired it. She seemed genuinely interested in hearing more so a second meeting was arranged and before he knew what was happening he was being invited to her apartment. When he, rather angrily, reminded her that he was married she looked shocked. It soon became apparent that Rachel had never mentioned that the handsome, brilliant author she was raving about was also her husband and that the stories were written for their dead son. As far as Kathryn was concerned she was being set up on a date as well as a meeting with a potential new author. Even after this came out though, Kathryn was adamant that the invitation to go home with her still stood and Puck could not deny for a few moments that he was tempted. In another life Kathryn could have been the one for him. She was smart, beautiful, confident and Jewish. In this life though he had already found all of those things in Rachel and no matter how crazy she was getting, he was committed to this life with her. He brought his professional relationship with Kathryn to a close that night and went home to Rachel.

He drove himself crazy after that, trying to figure out what to do. Everything she did seemed to be calculated to hurt him, like she wanted him to leave her. He talked to everyone he could think of, his mom, her dads, Shelby, Kristen. They all agreed that she needed help, that she was out of control, but nobody could think of a way of convincing her without her going nuts. A few weeks after the Kathryn incident, the solution finally presented itself to him. When he found her fucking her co-star in their living room he was apoplectic with rage. Not at her, it was clear that she barely knew what she was doing any more. He was incensed at the sick son-of-a-bitch who was taking advantage of a woman who clearly wasn't in her right mind. He had dragged him off of his wife and punched him before throwing him out of the house, not caring that he didn't have his clothes. When they were alone it just didn't occur to him to be mad at her. He just handed her the blanket from the back of the couch and calmly asked if she had used protection. It was at this point that she flipped and everything came out. She had never stopped her birth control. She had no intention of having any more children, just like she had no intention of staying in this marriage any longer.

The demand for a divorce made him see the situation clearly. She needed him to be out of the picture if she was going to get better. He was a constant reminder of everything that had gone wrong in the past few years. So, even though he had no intention of going through with it, he agreed to the divorce and moved out that night. That's not to say he wasn't always in the background, he just made himself an invisible part of her life. The day he moved out he called Shelby to tell her it was time to step up. Rachel needed her Mom. A few days later he got an excited call from Beth to say that she and her mom were moving to New York at the end of the school year and she would finally be able to go to the newspaper offices with him like he had promised. Strangely though, it was Quinn who turned out to be his best ally. He knew that Rachel had been in contact with some of the Gleeks after her stay in Lima so he sent out an SOS to all of them asking for them to call her or visit her, anything so that she knew that she wasn't alone. A couple of weeks later Quinn landed on Rachel's doorstep and announced that they were going on vacation to her house on Martha's Vineyard that she got in her divorce settlement. When she got back to New York a week later she made her first appointment with a therapist.

At that point Puck had thought that things would get better that it would only be a matter of time before he moved back into their house. He therefore wasn't sure how he had ended up standing on the doorstep of his old house the night before with divorce papers in hand, ready to be signed. He had never intended for it to get this far. He had hoped that he would be able to persuade her that they didn't need to go through with it and he thought he had succeeded when she took his hand and led him to their bedroom.

Now, as he watched his ex wife retreating into the office to feed the papers into a fax machine to send them to her lawyer, he felt defeated. Only three things had ever mattered to him, his wife, his son and his daughter, and he had lost all three. He'd come a long way since high school. He'd made his mother proud. But in that moment he realised that they were all right. He was then, now and forever just another Lima Loser and without Rachel in his life he had no hope of being anything else.

**A.N. So that's it. I hope you enjoyed and if you did please review. I have a few ideas for extending on this, going into what happens next and expanding on some of the flashbacks. If you want to read more, let me know.**


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